Buried Prey

said, “Let me think,” and a minute later said, “Fourth of July. He was joking about fireworks, you know, when . . . never mind. Anyway, the night of the fourth. Don had a baseball game on the radio, so it couldn’t have been too late.”
    The blonde went around the counter, took out a metal box, and began running through charge slips. Lucas said to Sally, “You said he’s okay. That means, what? He didn’t want anything peculiar?”
    “Hey, it was a therapeutic massage.”
    “I’m sure it was,” Lucas said. “Look, I don’t care what he wants, or what you do. I’m trying to figure out these girls and whether he might be weird. Can you tell me that? Is he weird?”
    Sally shrugged: “He wants the Three—start with a hand job, end with a blow job. Is that weird? I dunno. A hundred and twenty bucks, plus tip. I don’t remember the tip, but it wasn’t . . .” She dug for a word, and came up with one: “Memorable.”
    “So he’s got some money.”
    “He’s got some , anyway,” the woman said. “But I ain’t going to Vegas on a tip I can’t remember.”
    The blonde said, “I got a one-forty at eight forty-five Friday . . . that’s it, probably. Says his name is John . . .”
    “That’s gotta be him,” Sally said.
    Lucas took the slip and walked it to the table lamp. The ink imprint was shaky—the name was John Fell, Lucas thought, but the number was clear. Lucas took down the information, then asked, “You got a Xerox machine?”
    “No . . .”
    “I’m gonna take this,” he said, waggling the paper slip. “You need the information to make the charge?”
    “We already made it,” the blonde said. “We send it in while you’re still in the room.”
    “Okay.” Lucas flipped a page in his notebook: “I need both your names. I want to see driver’s licenses. I need to know how often he comes in.”
    The blonde began, “You said . . .”
    Lucas shook his head: “I’m not arresting anybody. If he turns out to be somebody, I need to know who I talked to.”
    The blonde’s name was Lucy Landry, and Sally’s name was Dorcas Ryan. John Fell had come in at least once in the past ten days, had been cheerful, funny, even, had been satisfied with the service and paid cash. Ryan had seen him at Kenny’s afterward, and he’d bought her a drink.
    “He bought you a drink, but he didn’t chat? Didn’t tell you about himself?”
    Ryan frowned: “You know what? Almost all he does is tell jokes. Like, ‘You heard the one about the priest who caught the sonofabitch?’ That’s what he does. He’s got a million of them.”
    Lucas used their telephone to call Daniel at home, who answered and, when Lucas identified himself, said, “This better be good.”
    “The guy’s name is John Fell and I’ve got a credit card slip on him. How do I get an address off the credit card?”
    There was a moment of silence, then Daniel said, “What I usually do is call Harmon Anderson, and he does something on the computer.”
    “So we gotta wait until he comes in?”
    “No, no, I’ll bust him out of bed,” Daniel said. “Where’re you?”
    “Down at the massage place,” Lucas said.
    “Go on downtown. I’ll have Anderson meet you there.”
    He hung up, and Ryan was telling Landry, “. . . so the Pope takes off his hat, puts his feet up on the table, and says, ‘You know what? You fuckers are all right.’”
    Landry only half smiled: “It’s not that funny.”
    “I didn’t say it was great,” Ryan said. She looked at Lucas. “I told her John’s sonofabitch joke.”
    Lucas shrugged: “I missed it. Can you break a dollar? I need a gumball.”
     
     
    BOTTOM LINE, Lucas thought, on his way downtown: he didn’t know how to get an address for a credit card. He needed to fix that. He chewed through the gumball in two minutes, threw the wad of gum out the window and drove faster.
    He got there before Anderson, and had to wait. Anderson showed up twenty-five minutes later, sleepy and annoyed, sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. Lucas was looking over his shoulder and asked, “What’re you doing here?”
    “A credit check,” Anderson said. “All the credit information is in computers. I can get in and look at some of the information for credit card holders. Including addresses and so on.”
    “Neat,” Lucas said. “I’m thinking of getting a Macintosh.”
    “Wait awhile—there’re rumors that they’re going to 512K this fall. The 128K just isn’t